Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication systems; and, more particularly, to identifying and characterizing operation of various components within such communication systems including sources of problems arising within such communication systems.
Description of Related Art
Data communication systems have been under continual development for many years. The primary goal within such communication systems is to transmit information successfully between devices. Unfortunately, many things can deleteriously affect signals transmitted within such systems resulting in degradation of or even complete failure of communication. Examples of adverse effects include interference and noise that may be caused by various sources including other communications, natural and man-made noise, low-quality links, degraded or corrupted interfaces and connectors, etc.
Some communication systems use forward error correction (FEC) coding and/or error checking and correction (ECC) coding to increase the reliability and the amount of information that may be transmitted between devices. When a signal incurs one or more errors during transmission, a receiver device can employ the FEC or ECC coding to try to detect and/or correct those one or more errors.
A continual and primary directive in this area of development has been to try continually to lower the signal to noise ratio (SNR) required to achieve a given bit error ratio (BER) or symbol error ratio (SER) within a communication system. The Shannon limit is the theoretical bound for channel capacity for a given modulation and code rate. The ideal goal has been to try to reach Shannon's channel capacity limit in a communication channel. Shannon's limit may be viewed as being the data rate per unit of bandwidth (i.e., spectral efficiency) to be used in a communication channel, having a particular SNR, where transmission through the communication channel with arbitrarily low BER or SER is achievable.
Data communication systems have been under continual development for many years. Sometimes, problems may occur that affect one or more of the various components within such communication systems so that the overall performance is less than optimal. Various problems such as equipment failure, degrading interfaces or connectors, etc. may themselves cause problems and/or allow external noise to enter the link and reduce the overall effectiveness of communications within such communication systems.
Diagnosis of such problems is typically performed by service personnel who conduct a service call to one or more locations where customers complain of poor service. Also, such service personnel can only analyze one given location at a time. A great deal of time is required to perform analysis of multiple locations within a multi-user communication system, and this procedure may be very labor and cost intensive.